


Sunrise in Space

by ultharkitty



Series: Problems with Combaticons (fallout from the Spare Parts Incident) [7]
Category: Transformers Generation One
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 10:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultharkitty/pseuds/ultharkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vortex confides in Blast Off, but the shuttle would rather he didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunrise in Space

**Author's Note:**

  * For [naboru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/naboru/gifts).



Blast Off lounged in geocentric orbit. The sun rose slowly over the wide curve of the Earth, illuminating a field of space junk. His alt mode scanners pierced the clouds, mapping the ground and highlighting potential sources of energy. He paid them little heed, more interested in the sunrise. Dividing his attention was worth the effort; it was so wonderful away from his team.

'Thrusters?' A line of text appeared in his HUD. Great, Vortex. 'Thrusters, you there?'

Blast Off sighed and corrected himself; it _had been_ wonderful away from his team. He composed a line of text in response. 'Message undeliverable. Recipient is currently offline.'

The response was immediate. 'Yeah, right. Thrusters, we need to talk.'

'No,' Blast Off responded. ' _You_ need to talk. And repeating that ridiculous pet name at me does not encourage me to engage you in conversation.'

'Uhuh, whatever. Listen.'

'You mean _read_ ,' Blast Off replied.

'You know what they say about pedants? They say pedants get really tetchy team mates.' There was a pause, and Blast Off began to wonder whether Vortex was sufficiently discouraged to leave him alone, but then a new line of text appeared. 'The combiner programming... Have you noticed any... side effects?'

'Side effects?' Blast Off returned. He had: an unwelcome surge of empathy, his panic at seeing Vortex maimed and unconscious after the dust storm, his urgent need to get the copter to Hook. A snarl shook his instruments; the programming had fabricated emotion, making him respond in ways he never otherwise would. But he’d rather fly into the Sun than admit it.

'Yeah,' Vortex wrote. 'Side effects. You know, like how the loyalty programming was all itchy and stuff and made me wanna kill Ramjet?'

Blast Off vented slowly and turned his nose to the sun. The heat was welcome. 'I don't believe that's entirely the loyalty programming,' he replied, then continued quickly to head off any protests to the contrary. 'But yes, I comprehend the nature of your query. Have you...' He stopped; he couldn't believe he was about to ask a direct question. Encouraging Vortex to talk; what in the universe was wrong with him? But he continued anyway. 'Have you experienced anything unusual?'

'Uh...' Vortex sent, and Blast Off wanted to shoot him. It was bad enough that Vortex often refused to distinguish between the verbal and written conventions of their language, but the meaningless little sounds transcribed as glyphs were just too much.

'Words,' Blast Off wrote. ‘Proper ones. Use them.'

'You know that thing with Swin?' The text was plain, no serifs or elongation of the vertical to indicate emphasis, but Blast Off nonetheless got the impression that Vortex wasn't quite in his right mind. Not that his right mind was ever entirely right.

'Yes,' Blast Off replied. How could he forget? They'd all been angry after the Spare Parts Incident, but what Vortex had done to Swindle went beyond ordinary revenge. Every cable severed, every connector sliced or burnt or crushed. Only the most rudimentary link had remained between Swindle's laser core and his personality component.

It was no surprise that Swindle was still alive, nor that Onslaught had allowed the ‘punishment’ until the last possible moment. But it was a surprise that Vortex hadn't initiated an interface, hacking Swindle's sensor net to transfer every last synaptic impulse to himself.

There was a long pause before Vortex responded. 'It made me wanna purge.'

 _And?_ Blast Off thought, but then his intellect caught up with him. That wasn't right. Vortex didn't ‘wanna purge’ because he took someone apart. Blast Off had seen him work, had witnessed him play as well. Vortex didn't get squeamish when he killed someone; he got excited. 'What do you mean?' Blast Off asked.

'It was all right at first, kinda good y'know. But then it got... not so good.'

'I'm not sure I follow,' Blast Off responded, and he wasn't sure he wanted to.

'You ever had anyone pour a _really_ strong alkali down your auxiliary fuel intake?' Vortex asked, but he didn't wait for a response. 'It was like that, kinda. Like... like I got a virus or something. Core temp went all screwy, equilibrium chip glitched. Couldn't think straight, just... Just wanted to stop.'

'And did you?' Blast Off asked. He wasn't sure what had happened at the end, only that Onslaught had intervened, had taken Swindle to med bay and Vortex to the rec room where Blast Off had been ordered to watch him until he came around.

'I didn't have a choice,' Vortex replied. 'Ons hit me. He laid me out.'

'Would you have stopped by yourself, if Onslaught hadn’t hit you?' Blast Off asked.

'I don't know. I still... I chucked my tanks in the holding cell. Ons thinks I did it on purpose.'

Blast Off checked the frequency, hoping for one fleeting moment that it wasn't actually Vortex he was talking to, that it was someone playing a bizarre and frankly disturbing practical joke. But the frequency was right, the tone was right. It couldn't have been anyone else.

'It didn't come from me,' Vortex sent. 'It isn't me, I don't do that. It's the programming.'

'The programming has no effect on our core personalities,' Blast Off wrote, and it didn’t, he was sure of it. The effect was in their emotive responses, their physiological reactions. Or his and Vortex’s anyway. Queasy, he quashed the memory of his team mate in stasis lock, inert in his hold as he shot towards the Nemesis. 'The combiner software is merely an augmentation.'

'I know,' Vortex replied, and Blast Off could imagine him pacing, his rotors utterly still, his fingers twitching. 'But it's doing something to us.'

'To you,' Blast Off lied.

'Same thing,' Vortex responded. 'You'll see. It'll get you, sooner or later. It's changing us, it's giving us new limits, making us... do stuff we wouldn't do if we didn’t have it. This thing Starscream put in our heads, it's just a new kind of prison.'

'Stop being melodramatic,' Blast Off began, but Vortex was gone, the signal lost. Odd, but it wasn’t necessarily due to the copter's actions; Earth’s weather could have strange effects on Cybertronian communications.

Still, the astroseconds stretched into breems, and Vortex made no attempt to renew their conversation. With any luck, he wouldn’t raise the topic again.

Blast Off rolled to show his underside to the sun, and focused for a while on his scans. But despite the glare of solar radiation, and the frequent distracting pings as new energy sources were identified, analysed and categorised, he couldn't relax.

The sun on his plating just didn't seem so warm any more.


End file.
